


The Last Five Years

by ElbridgeGerry



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: All aboard the Reylo pain train, Dark!Rey, F/M, The Last Five Years insp, choo choo, they grew up together!
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-31
Updated: 2018-01-31
Packaged: 2019-03-11 17:24:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,755
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13529049
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ElbridgeGerry/pseuds/ElbridgeGerry
Summary: "Covered with scars I did nothing to earn. Maybe there's somewhere a lesson to learn. But that wouldn't change the fact, that wouldn't speed the time."Five years in the lives of Rey and Ben, five years of choices and mistakes and stolen kisses and forbidden loves.





	1. I'm Still Hurting/See I'm Smiling

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired lightly by the musical The Last Five Years, though it in no way follows the plot, except that this story spans five years with each character progressing in alternate directions. I highly recommend listening to the musical, though. For the purposes of this story Rey and Ben are the same age, just because I can't be bothered doing the math.

The mask has always been suffocating, too hot and too tight around her skull, pricking electric shocks through her pain. The pain is what propels her forward, reminds her who she is. If the obsidian visor obscures the wetness in her eyes from the world, then it is doing its job. The vocoder hides the girlish voice that’s just a little too high pitched to be convincing, that, despite all her hard work, remains just a little too innocent.

She catches a glimpse of herself in the plate glass window of the _Finalizer’s_ bridge. She is wrapped in black robes, billowing and binding and making her small frame seem all the more imposing. Black Sullust leather gloves cover hands that are not just metaphorically bloodstained, but literally too. Lashed over thousands of time until clutching her sabrestaff becomes an act of pure masochism, wrenching the purest anger from her soul.

Supreme Leader Snoke is wise, he has made something from nothing, has spun greatness where there was once a junkrat from nowhere. The loneliness that once picked at her soul has been replaced by an overwhelming sense of power, she retains control over everything around her, with power, she is never alone. The chains of the Jedi teachings that once enslaved her have broken, she is free to reach her highest potential, to become more than Luke Skywalker ever would have allowed her to become. He had been scared of her, they all had. She had emerged from the heart of a X’us’R’iia burned and tattered and from that broken shell Snoke had turned her into a dark, beautiful monster.

Before her, the people who she once considered her family, the people she once thought of as friends run for their lives, are fleeing a creature in a mask who used to climb into some of their laps to soothe her childish nightmare, who once loved so completely that it destroyed her soul.

A Force signature flickers across her consciousness and she reaches out to it. A Corellian YT-1300f light freighter with a modified Series 401 0.5 class hyperspace drive and a set of Nova crystals hanging on the dashboard, mined by a young Rey in a different time. On board, an old man and his young and terrified son prepare to jump to hyperspace, to get as far away from D’Qar and the First Order fleet as possible. The pain of the scene playing across her mind’s eye is more painful than any torture Snoke could impart, more painful than any wound, than any death.

She clenches her fingers around the base of her sabrestaff, letting the raw, stinging pain echo throughout her body, sending a shiver up her spine.

“Captain Canady, prep your dreadnaught. This is where we snuff out the Resistance once and for all. No survivors.”  

 

*

 

He feels his feet hit the soft earth of Corellia, a light rain dashing his shoulders. He is young and in love and there is nothing that can take this joyous lightness away from him, the soft earth kicking up around him, not yet sodden enough to congeal.

As the last of his stamina depletes, he wraps his arm around a tree trunk, swinging himself around it as he skids to a stop, melodious laughter punctuated by heavy gasps of breath. His female companion, trailing several metres behind him, laughs too as she begins to stop herself. He reaches out to the Force, grabbing a handful of fallen leaves and catapulting them at her. They snag in her hair, all shades of red and purple and orange, catching in the three buns at the back of her head, the loose tendrils framing her face.

She catches up to him, and he grabs her by the small of her back and lifting her up to him, kissing her wildly as she laughs hysterically. It’s years of pent up infatuation and lust and everything else exploding and threatening to consume them both and all he can do is marvel at how _soft_ her lips are. In the ten years he’s known her and the four he’s known he’s wanted her, he never once imagined how paralytically soft she could be. She had always been Rey of Jakku, the only being in Luke’s Academy who could knock him on his ass almost effortlessly. The only one who could understand him, who could calm him, who could look at him not as Ben Solo,  _son of Princess Leia Organa and legendary smuggler Han Solo, nephew to Luke Skywalker, grandson of Darth Vader and Queen Padmé Amidala, named for Obi Wan Kenobi_ , but instead as Ben Solo, _Nuisance_.

For years she had grounded him, until she had thrown his mind into the chaos of the clouds.

He relinquishes control quickly, he’s smarter than to think he can try and compete with Rey at a moment like this, as she bunches up his robes in her small fists and slams him into the tree trunk behind him. A small “oof” tumbles from his lips, giving Rey just enough breathing room to curse and say, “I’ve wanted this for so long,” which snaps something deep inside him.

He wraps his arms around her, hitching her up until her legs circle around his waist. He kisses her like it’s the end of the world, because, in so many ways, it is. They can never go back after this. They have kicked open the door of unhappiness, though now he is too young and too naive and too lovesick.


	2. See I'm Smiling/Moving Too Fast

A year. A year has passed since she last laid eyes on Ben Solo. She has had retching nightmares predicting this moment, predicting the way the anger would rush out of her body like water from the shore before the tsunami of pain would slam over her.

He’s running through the forest of Takodana, that damned droid nowhere to be found. He looks so young, so afraid. Of course he has no clue who she is, for the best that he knows, he is being hunted by a cloaked monster, the Darkness of his nightmares come to life, the unfinished legacy of the grandfather breaking through to reality.

His lightsaber is gone, and he is feverish and uncalculated in the Force, angry without purpose, an unstable reactor prepared to blow, nothing like the Solo she had known in a different life.

He is easy to subdue. Solo had been a formidable opponent before, the thought of taking him down so easily a fantasy, but Snoke has made her strong, almost invincible.

Later, the sight of him bound in the interrogation room almost startles her, almost elicits a soft emotion from her blackened soul. She braces herself against the wall, breathing deeply, centering herself on her mission: she must find and destroy Skywalker, the man who had made her weak.

She releases the Stasis she has held him in, and he comes to with a loud clanking of the weight of his body against his shackles. The overwhelming force of his desire to kill her cracks against her mind like a whip. She laughs, his hotheadedness is the most familiar thing in the world to her, nary a clue who his opponent is and already he seeks total annihilation. He would’ve made a great Sith Lord had his soul not been rendered so utterly weak by his childish love.

“You still want to kill me,” she says, as though it’s the most surprising thing in the world.

“That happens when you’re being hunted by a creature in a mask.” She stands, bitterly excited to employ some of the melodrama that had made the Solo-Skywalker family infamous. She disengages the locking mechanism of the mask, throwing it to the ashen table beside her. Ben Solo, who had never learned to control his facial expressions, who had never taught himself to keep his emotions in check, barely flinches. The effect in the Force, however, is immediate and and catastrophic, as though he is crying out in torture.

Without her mask to protect her, she almost falters, almost remembers the forbidden kisses in the hallways of the Enclave, almost feels the way he held her through her nightmares, almost hears the startled laughter pulled from his chest when he least expected it. In a moment of weakness, she is almost human again.

 

*

 

The light of the three moons floods the otherwise darkened room, bathing two bodies in a frosted glow. Their lips don’t move but they are deep in conversation, lighting fires in their Force bond.

_This is dangerous_ , Rey says as Ben pulls her hair loose from the tight knots its held up in.

 

_Everything is dangerous, but we can be strong enough to protect ourselves_.

 

_Passion leads to the Dark Side, we know this, we’ve been taught this so many times, I can’t believe how stupid we’re being_ , Rey says, pushing his hand away from her face, removing hers from his bare chest.

 

_Compassion, then, Rey. We will walk in compassion._

 

For the briefest of moments, Ben is on the meadows of Naboo, a warm sun and a cool breeze enveloping him, his heart full. It is not his memory, this complete happiness, it is from a age long gone, a hereditary memory ingrained in his very bones.

 

_But Master Luke –_

 

“– is distracted by far greater problems than this,” he replies, kissing the corner of her lip as she gasps. There is perfect peace in this moment. Tonight, they hold each other, two souls utterly devoted to one another, giddy with the nerves of young love, and tomorrow they will build their first lightsabers, Ben with a permafrost crystal from Hoth and Rey with a durindfire crystal (an eminently rare gem off of Tatooine, and if it had so happened that Han Solo had brought one for Rey on the anniversary of her arriving at the Academy, then sure it was just luck, and not the pleading of his starstruck son that had made it happen).

Rey looks up at him through thick eyelashes and his heart forgets to beat.

“Yes,” she says, and then his heart is beating with ferocity. This path they are choosing to walk, this path of attachment, it will only ever make them stronger, make them better.

Outside, beyond the safety of Corellia’s atmosphere, the forces of Darkness may be regrouping, strengthening themselves and planning the ruin of worlds, but within the safety of the walls of the Jedi Academy radiates a love so strong it can span across the stars.


End file.
